In all the poetry of the age in which Carew flourished, there is to be found a straining after resemblances, and too often the sense is sacrificed in the effort; personification is too often used, without judgment, or taste. It is this fault which, more than any other, has called down upon the poets of the age in which Carew flourished, so much severe, and oftentimes unjust criticism.
But without offering these songs of Carew as models, without denying that according to the rigid canons of polished criticism, many glaring faults may be found in them, we still insist that their beauties are many, and to the eye, which brings not every thing to the narrow measure of a stern critic’s scrutiny, will more than compensate for unquestioned blemishes. The blemishes are the offspring of the distorted taste of the age in which our poet flourished—their beauties, the triumph of the poet’s genius over the difficulties in his pathway.
THE SPRING.
Now that the winter’s gone, the earth has lost
Her snow-white robes, and now no more the frost
Candies the grass, or casts an icy cream
Upon the silver lake, or crystal stream;
But the warm sun thaws the benumbed earth,
And makes it tender, gives a sacred birth
To the dead swallow, wakes in hollow tree